Spiderman!

They're filming Spiderman 3 a block from our house. Later, there were people with pointy helmets! Lots of cabs parked on that street, lots of trailers on the surrounding streets. This is way more impressive than when Conviction was filming around here.

Concert ticket dilemma

I bought Radiohead tickets for June 13th as part of making up my long absence to Catherine (at 2x face value!) and then I found out that the Eels are playing for free that night. :-( But it looks like Craiglist has a semi-vibrant ticket forum, so maybe I'll be able to pull off a trade. One cool thing, though, in Google Calendar, you can search for the New York Free Concerts feed, which includes all the River to River shows.

Google Notebook finally out!

After a few incredibly-hard, girlfriend-frustrating weeks at work, Google Notebook is out. It has a few more warts than we might like, but it'll be nice to see people using it. Even the early broken versions of it were super-useful to me. Anyway, I'm going to catch up on sleep, but I'm looking forward to having my life back. ;-)

Why is it

that when you do interesting things, you're too busy to blog about them?

I spent the past few weekends out of town, and, in anticipation of that, did a bunch of fun stuff last month right before I left. We finally had dinner at Po (tasty, especially for the price), got cheese at Murray's (tasty), and went to the Bodies exhibit (much cooler than I thought it would be - diseased organs, vascular systems - although be sure to ask for the free MetroCard discount before you pay). I also had the 3-is-sort-of-like-unlimited-mimosas brunch at Essex (hip) and a *cough* few drinks afterward, and brunch at Cookshop (divine).

Inspired by Po, I found a recipe for wild rice with lemony escarole that was tasty. And tonight I made pasta with brocoli rabe and gorgonzola sauce (inspired by a cookbook my mom got as part of a rampage when she saw one on my Amazon wish list).


As for all the weekend trips, I went to Charles's wedding (beautiful) and talked Richard into buying Guitar Hero. The weekend after, I was in Barcelona (pictures at left), where we went to the market, a cava factory, the Sagrada Familia, a random military museum, and a restaurant with moderinsme on the walls and a great wine pick by Catherine's friend's husband. This past weekend, I went to DC to meet up with my family, where our planned baseball game was rained out, but we still went to Mt. Vernon, the American History Museum, where we spent most of the time on the science stuff, and the Holocaust Museum, which has an intense temporary exhibition about eugenics.

Obviously, it's nice to be back home, but now work's hectic and we have lots of Tribeca Film Festival tickets (resident discount - score!). Maybe June will be calm.

Bit o stuff

Went gallery-hopping with Jordan Saturday. Saw some interesting stuff, like paintings with nails in them, several paintings of people underwater, sculptures of heads, blurry paintings based on photo collages, digitially-altered photos of taxidermy in nature, foggy New York scenes, comics about going vegan as performance art, rooms with words painted on the walls, photorealistic paintings of cloth wrapping unknown objects.

But the definite star of the show was Fields of Fire, video pieces depicting highly abstracted oil drilling and a 10 minute movie of flowing oil and blood that was amazingly intense. One weird thing is that I couldn't find out much about how the artist (who actually was hanging out at the gallery!) did what she did. The best clue was on this Corcoran page, which explains, "She achieves unusual effects of motion and color by re-photographing her images repeatedly, by transferring them from video to film and back again, and by using digital manipulation." (Also in the how'd-they-do-that category, a good article in Wired about rotoscoping for Scanner Darkly.)

Patois brunch was tasty, although they ran out of french toast, and the mimosas were pleasantly free-flowing until they ran out of champagne (!).

Catherine and I got caught up in the Project Runway marathon. It was actually very entrancing. I'm rooting for Santino, even if he is an ass. This, plus an article about collectives in the Times, plus the gallery-hopping, left me thinking about the production of art. I wonder how much real-world fashion is actually the result of a single creative effort, as opposed to soliciting input from coworkers, bosses, focus groups and such, as with movies, software, and books. It's interesting that industries like fashion seem to do okay despite the absence of a filter/promotion engine like a publishing company. It's not like the winners of Runway have a hope of being something-equivalent-to-an-artist-being-signed-by-a-label. But maybe I just don't know enough about the fashion industry.

Meanwhile, the Times podcasts are a dangerously blood-pressure-raising way of passing the time on the way to work. So much stupidity from the Bush administration, but nothing ever comes of the columnists' whining. Maybe they should lock Bush in a room with a stack of them and not him leave till he recognize how incompetent he is. And then there's David Brooks, insisting that the only things worth knowing happened in Plato (yay infringing copy, columns want to be free!). Is he really this dumb? Also, he suggests that people take statistics. If only he had. Is there really nobody smarter than him to take up that space in the Times? Even Dowd is more interesting.

Conviction is taping around the corner at 10 (that's life living near the courts). Sounds like a fun outing to me.

Silliness

It turns out the manual activation of the backlight not working with the new Ipod firmware is a known issue. Thanks Apple! That was an upgrade well worth a half hour install and a restart. Uh, not.

In other silliness news, I noticed that Mark Pilgrim's Butler script blocks Google ads. I wonder how often the ad to buy his book on Google has made him money. Come on, Mark, don't you think your script would be sufficiently useful without that?

I fall down less

The Google ski trip rundown from Dens is better than I could ever manage, especially because I was too lazy to tote my camera around. The parties raged, and the Mike's Way green run at Stratton let me feel all grown up, coming down from the top of the mountain while only occasionally losing my skis.